It's objectively hilarious that the useful idiots so virulently angry about Flock look like the type of people that don't drive a car, so it makes you wonder what the fuss about ALPRs is and how it affects them.
If Flock was used to enforce congestion pricing in the cities they ride bikes in, they would all be for it.
Don't act like flock is incapable of tracking bicycles and individual humans. The product may have been sold as ALPR but scope is creeping to total persistent surveillance.
I love how you constructed an entire alternate dimension, a playground where you can argue with endless strawmen and look so good defeating them. Yes, all the people who oppose Flock are non-drivers despite the US being a car-first country, and these non-drivers don't care about the rights of others or encroachments in their general directions, and they all want to turn isolated toll gate cameras into a surveillance movement tracking network, and they even support individual surveillance via Ring. The hypocrisy of these millions of real people that totally exist. Useful idiots indeed.
I agree, but then learning to code isn't much of a hurdle. It's a similar effort to learning vim. The difficult part is getting to know the language. I never coded in Haskell for example and learning to use that language would take effort. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy with an LLM at hand.
It might even help in figuring out whether Haskell would be a good fit. Something I couldn't do, as I do not know the language. Then again, it's not a question that really gets asked much in a corporate setting. Most things are just solved in a few popular languages, whether that makes the most sense or not.
> learning to code isn't much of a hurdle... The difficult part is getting to know the language.
I agree. The people who depend on chatbots to write their code for them won't have either of those skills though. They don't know (or are in the process of forgetting) how to code, and they're missing out on the opportunity to really learn the language by turning off their brain and letting a bot spoon-feed them code.
An LLM would only get in your way if you actually wanted to learn Haskell.
We’re like 6-7 tiers deep on that aren’t we? Does every c developer understand the instruction set on the cpus their code is executing against? Does every c#/java/other managed memory language deeply understand their garbage collector?
It’s abstractions all the way down and most people aren’t going to have an intimate understanding of every layer, and it’s not economically worth it for the vast majority to even try
Abstractions are very different from having a bot regurgitate code for you. Abstractions are an aspect of the programing languages we use. Using them means using the language.
LLMs just give you results (of highly variable quality) and if you lack a solid understanding of the language being used that result gets blindly accepted as valid (especially if it manages to 'do the thing' when you test it). Learning how to type a prompt is not the same as learning how to code or learning a programing language.
Actually, if by “learning to code” you mean “writing good usable code”, my experience is that many people struggle to code. Especially when you consider planning a (human-level) complex project.
Maybe you don’t know those people. I work with them every day.
China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.
With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.
The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.
Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.
Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.
Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.
This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.
Population of China is 1404 milions, population of France is 66 milion, so per capita France produces more electricity.
95% and 50% show that France has electric grid with much lower carbon emissions per unit of energy then China.
France build most of its nuclear reactors in 1980s (54 reactors within 15 years), as a reaction to oil schocks in 1970s. This transformation was faster then what is currently in China (again when compared per capita).
This is HN. This is a site for engineers. We’re discussing one of the largest and fastest energy buildouts in the history of humanity, larger by orders of magnitude than anything that’s come before. You can hate China if you want, but then you should be scared and worried. Minimizing the scale of what they’re doing isn’t interesting.
I don't hate China, in fact I have many colleagues from China. Energy buildout in China is big, because everything in China is big, because it's a country of 1,404 million people. And India is on the same trajectory as China, only 20 years delayed:
What I'm worried is that people don't understand the energy priorities of China, they are first and foremost: energy independence and cheap plentiful energy. Any decarbonization efforts are pursued only if they are not conflict with the first goal. This is very different from the goals of many European governments of phasing out nuclear energy, fossil energy, even when it causes dependence on energy imports and high energy prices (high when comparing with China, US).
When comparing growth of low-carbon energy in China, France. In 15 years (2010-2015) China's share of energy from low-carbon sources changes from 4% to 12 %. In France (1976 - 1991) from 5% to 38%.
The biggest difference between China and France is: China has plentiful coal reserves and mines a lot of coal, France has only small coal reserves and had to import lot of coal.
"Despite its wealth, France has never been self-sufficient in coal, and even at the peak of production in the 1960s, it always imported foreign coal (from Belgium, the UK, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, etc.)."
I'm perfectly aware that we (we as the whole humanity) are turning our planet to hell with our CO2 emission, but Asian countries is not following the path of European countries of decreasing energy production and Asian countries are building renewables not to replace fossil energy production, but to add to fossil energy production.
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
If China (and India and …) sees the US and other industrialized doing nothing, why should they do anything?
The most straight-forward way of solving is either through cap-and-trade (like acid rain was dealt with) or 'carbon dividend' (which Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Volker, etc endorsed):
And yet their coal usage dropped (for electricity) or was flat (when you include e.g. coal to chemicals) while both electricity use and GDP grew about 5%
Half-coal powered electrification is cleaner, greener, cheaper and smarter than sticking to ICE cars and gas heating for homes and industry.
China has gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to 30% this century while US and Europe went from around 20% to just above 20%
Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".
> Energy storage is required along with solar farms
How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.
There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:
> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.
Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.
The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.
Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?
Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.
What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
So two filesystems that are essentially shunned from the Linux kernel and permanent second-class citizens, and one that was removed from Red Hat and has a questionable history of reliability. Oh boy which do I choose?
There's also not a lot of money in Canonical for someone (Oracle) to sue for. Red Hat (now IBM/Red Hat) and I guess even SUSE is a different equation. Red Hat just wouldn't touch ZFS because of licensing.
> Why do you care if other distros consider it too risky given different business positions/models?
I don't know. Why do people comment on HN? :shrug:? It's fun and interesting to have a conversion?
I was mainly responding to a GP post that said "zfs is shunned. can't really get around that copyright issue". It didn't have a subject in there. As in "I can't really get around" or "anyone can't get around". And I read it as the second version and pointed that at least one distro did get around it.
it is big enough that it prevents distributions to include zfs. and that in reality is the problem. i would not care much if all distributions decided to ignore the copyright issue like canonical does and i could therefore get reliable support for zfs. but alone the thought of having to boot a rescue system to fix my broken computer and then not having zfs support because no one built a rescue system with it included is making the risk to high.
Distributions aren't locked from distributing ZFS, the only group that actually is suing is few kernel developers w/ their lawyers who have non-standard understanding of copyright (including one that isn't norm for the linux kernel, including for filesystems).
who is at fault doesn't really matter. the end result is that distributions aren't including it, and that kills it. unlike almost anything else which i can add to a system after booting it, filesystems need to be available from the start. until debian, fedora, suse, etc are convinced that there is no threat this just won't happen.
I learned about VDO today. [0][1] I'd never heard of it before, but I'm using Gentoo Linux and both the dm-vdo kernel module and the 'vdo' software provided by [1] are distributed by Gentoo... so this isn't some weirdo Red Hat thing. It looks like you manage and used these just like any other thin-provisioned LVM volume [2], but -like I said- I've not used this before, and have only just skimmed the docs, so it's possible that I'm missing something important.
I don't see that as odd. It looks like it was released at about the same time that zstd was getting added to filesystems, and a little bit prior to when IBM acquired Red Hat. It's quite possible that IBM decided that "little" things like enhancing LVM aren't worth the money.
A better analogy would be slipping something into her drink whilst handing her a 12-page stapled terms of service agreement in which she unknowingly gives full consent.
If Flock was used to enforce congestion pricing in the cities they ride bikes in, they would all be for it.
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